Angelus Oaks firefighter learns burning cabin was childhood home

ANGELUS OAKS - Norm Cione and his wife Nancy were relaxing on the porch of their home here Tuesday when the calm of the late morning was broken by the sounds of sirens screaming down Highway 38.

"Then we heard the helicopter and we thought, `Uh-oh. Something's up.' That's when our fire pager went off," said Norm Cione.

The couple, both members of the San Bernardino County Fire Department in Angelus Oaks, geared up and headed to the location on the pager: Highway 38 and Glass Road near Barton Flats.

Before the day was out, Norm Cione would be one of the first fire crews at the scene putting out a blaze at the cabin fired Los Angeles police Officer Christopher Dorner made his last stand - and Cione's childhood home.

"I didn't know at first it was my old home," Cione said Friday as he sat in his easy chair in his Angelus Oaks home. "I thought it may have been another cabin, but soon I figured out it was the place where I had grown up."

Cione said his family purchased the property in 1960 and his parents sold it in the 1980s.

"We used to rent out the cabins," he said. "We called them housekeeping cabins because you didn't have to bring anything with you except food."

The cabins were rented out mostly in the summer, he said.

"There are a lot of memories for a lot of people connected with that place," he said.

Cione remembers his parents would visit the cabins every summer before they had the opportunity to buy the property themselves. William Glass first built the cabins in the 1920s after he returned to California from World War I.

"I remember as a kid Mr. Glass would allow all the kids to help him sort the mail - back then the cabin was also the post office - and then we'd ride in the back of his pickup truck to the local store and distribute the mail bags for all the people who lived in the canyon," Cione said as he recalled his happy summers away from Lynwood.

At a time when there was no Internet, no cell phones and no video games, the quiet serenity of the cabins was a welcome way for many to get away from the rat race.

"It was a world away from everything," Cione said.

According to Cione, the cabin wasn't just a summer playground for city folks. It was also a community hub for those who lived in the surrounding areas.

"My mom used to make spaghetti dinners every Sunday and people would come up here and just be social," Cione said.

Cione's knowledge of the cabins became valuable to San Bernardino County sheriff's officials on Tuesday when Cione told them there was indeed a basement in the home.

"I mean, I spent my whole childhood there and I knew the layout," he said. "I remember I used to sleep in that basement during the summers because it was much cooler than the rest of the house."

Cione remained at the scene well into Tuesday night, and as he walked among the ashes and rubble of what was once his home, he found a scorched praying angel figurine.

After learning a sheriff's deputy, Jeremiah MacKay, had been killed and Deputy Alex Collins wounded in an exchange of gunfire with Dorner, Cione picked up the small statuette of an angel and placed it on a blackened post.

"It stayed there all these days," Cione said. "With all that going on and the commotion, it's still there."

And when the current owner, Candy Martin, and her family arrived Friday to look over their property for the first time since the shoot-out, they also left the angel perched atop its post looking over the foundation of the cabin home.

"I just wanted the Sheriff's Department to know that the Fire Department felt for their loss," Cione said.